Sunday, 20 January 2013

OK, so I’m happy to see Tesco seriously embarrassed by the noise over horsemeat
in some of its economy burgers. I get fed up with all its self-righteous
twaddle about providing value for money when it uses every underhand marketing
trick in the book to squeeze as much as possible out of shoppers. But it has
made me wonder why people are so enraged at the thought of eating horsemeat.

It’s not just that there are parts of the world where they tuck into
equine flesh, or other animals that make us Brits turn up our noses, with gusto.
But I would bet that it’s wound up in plenty of things that go through a messy
industrial process and wind up in the bargain shelves and cabinets of the
supermarkets.

I’ve never knowingly eaten horsemeat, but I’m not disturbed at the
thought that I may well have done so unknowingly at some time. The fact is that
we tuck into lots of meat products – pies, sausage rolls, processed slices with
different names – that have all the odds and ends from dead animals that we
would rather not think about. I suspect that the companies who produce this go
for the cheapest option on buying their raw material and horse creeps in more
often than anyone would admit. You just accept that if you buy cheap meat
products you get what you pay for.

I’ve accepted for years that I’m eating things that the manufacturers
would want to keep quiet, and as long as it doesn’t poison me I’m not going to
make a fuss as long as they don’t make
dishonest claims about it being high quality, unadulterated beef, lamb, pork,
chicken or whatever. And if we happily eat cows, pigs and sheep, and do pretty
horrible things in raising them as food, why should we get so squeamish over horses?

Probably because we’ve been brought up on movies and TV programmes in
which horses had some unspoken empathy with human beings – think Black Beauty
or Champion the Wonder Horse – or run around a racecourse to give us a moment
of excitement. Who would have wanted to eat Red Rum?

But people in other parts of the world don’t feel like that, and I don’t
quite buy into it. And if you want to draw a parallel with domestic animals, I’m
in no hurry to eat a cat or dog, but I’d do so if I was facing starvation, and
I’ll quite happily tuck into stewed rabbit.

And if I’m ever somewhere that it’s on the menu and I receive a
recommendation, I’ll eat a horse.

Saturday, 12 January 2013

I’ve felt ambivalent about Quentin Tarantino for a long time. I loved his
debut Reservoir Dogs – a great heist movie that was fast, inventive, witty and
frightening – but found it hard to feel so enthusiastic about his next film, Pulp
Fiction.

I admired the skill with which the story was told, the action set
pieces, and dark humour, snappy dialogue, but I had an uneasy feeling that it
had crossed a line. In the first film it was always clear that the bad guys
were bad guys and deserved a bad end. In the second there were subtle
differences that suggested that there was no such thing as a bad guy and the
violence was all part of a jolly game laid on for our amusement.

It left me feeling that Tarantino had drifted into morally dubious
territory, a feeling that was intensified when I saw From Dusk till Dawn, for
which he wrote the screenplay, which asked us to accept as heroes two bank
robbers who begin the film by kidnapping then murdering an innocent female bank
clerk. It left a nasty taste in the mouth that has put me off seeing any of his
movies since.

I have been tempted to break the boycott by the reviews for his new
effort, Django Unchained, on the strength from some glowing reviews. The fact
that it’s about a slave fighting back in 19th century America has
made me think maybe there are some genuine good and guys in it. But I’m not
sure after watching Tarantino’s latest tantrum.

The strop he threw at Krishna Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 for asking about
the possibility of a link between enjoying screen violence and inflicting it on
others made it clear this is someone who doesn’t want to face an awkward
question about what he does. It’s not an easy one to answer, and it’s full of
ambiguities. Most of us enjoy screen violence – you can go back to the earliest
cowboy or gangster films to see it was a key ingredient of their success – and the
moral context or characterisations of those involved affect us all in different
ways. But it is a serious that has issue with a lot of implications for a
society which has its share of real life random violence.

I don’t expect Tarantino to have easy answers, but he makes a lot of
money and has won worldwide fame by depicting violence in a way that suggests
it’s there to be enjoyed. It’s the defining element of his career. He has an
obligation to at least debate the question, no matter how often he’s asked, and
throwing a wobbly at an interviewer isn’t going to win him any friends, and may
lose a few who are currently on his side.

And I still haven’t made up my mind about whether to see Django
Unchained.

Sunday, 6 January 2013

Yesterday I had one of those moments that comes to all of us as we get
older, reading an obituary of someone I assumed had died years ago.

It was Harry Carey Jr, a Hollywood actor who, despite not being a big
star, is a familiar face to all of us who love old westerns. He was one of the
regulars in John Ford movies, which meant that he had significant parts in some
John Wayne classics – The Searchers and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon – and a couple
of starring roles – The Three Godfathers and Wagon Master. He had his highest
profile in the 1950s but used to crop up in movies and on TV until the 1990s, and
wrote a book about working on the Ford westerns.

No-one would argue that he was among the Hollywood greats, but he was
one of those character actors who always contributed to a good movie and could
sometimes provide a redeeming factor for a bad one. And he was one of the faces
who would prompt many of us to point at a screen and say “Look who that is!”

I have to mark his passing because I’m a great fan of John Ford movies.
I’ve watched some of them several times over – Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine,
Rio Bravo, The Searchers – and always enjoy them even though I know what’s
coming. I know there’s something dubious about many of them, feeding a myth about
the west that airbrushes the fact that land was stolen and native Americans
wiped out in their hundreds of thousands, but they’re great stories with intriguing
characters and make magnificent use of the landscape.

Ford was the visionary, and there’s no arguing that the presence of
leading actors like John Wayne and Henry Fonda was crucial to their artistic as
much as commercial success, but the supporting actors were as much as part of
it. They wouldn’t be the same without the likes of Walter Brennan, Victor
McLaglen, Ben Johnson, and Harry Carey Jr.